Iodyne designs a superb storage array

Iodyne, discovered a few weeks ago with the lunch of its Pro Data storage array for pro users, was a good surprise of the last IT Press Tour.

We had the privilege to meet and visit the company and we discovered a brilliant team. But we're not surprised when you know that sone founders, Mike Shapiro and Jeff Bonwick, have invented and launched a few famous projects and products such ZFS, Fishworks and DSSD.

The company addresses the need of a small shared storage array for small teams named Pro Data. In fact the capacity is 12 or 24TB fully equipped of NVMe M.2 SSDs. By shared I mean that the array is connected at the same time to multiple hosts. And the beauty of this resides in the total absence of specific network equipment, the device being directly connected via Thunderbolt ports. The last point is related to the nature of the device, it's not a NAS, it's a block device exposing a block interface to hosts therefore to be used, a file system must be generated on top of it and nodes mount natively file system. The file systems are assimilated to volumes, controlled by one machine at a time, meaning that haring is sequential not concurrent for each volume.

Here is a summary the specifications of the Iodyne Pro Data:

• Size = like a 15" laptop
• Capacity = 12 or 24TB raw
• Drives = 12 or 24 NVME M.2 SSDs
• Throughput = 5GB/s globally
• Ports = Thunderbolt (2 x 4 ports)
• Software = Raid 6, encryption

Supported by Mac, and soon Windows and Linux, the only portable file system is FAT32 and should be chosen carefully if such portability is needed. If you stay in 1 environment, the choice is obvious, later you can use Tuxera or Paragon to access them.

The Pro Data, as a block device, is really different from NAS servers exposing NFS and/or SMB in addition to the optional iSCSI. You choose a NAS to share files on a LAN and iSCSI is an option. You don't choose a NAS to do block. The reverse is true, Pro Data files are shared via the hosts connected to it exposing content on the network via a file sharing protocol such AFP, SMB or NFS.

I will publish an interview of Mike Shapiro and Jeff Bonwick in a few weeks on "The French Storage Podcast".